Comment by api

4 days ago

I've said this since time immemorial, and networking people often dismiss it. "Just use DNS," say people who have never actually worked netops or devops.

The length of the addresses and the clunky nature of their ASCII representation is absolutely the #1 reason the IPv6 has taken this long. User experience is the most powerful force affecting large scale adoption, and IPv6 has poor UX.

I think the UX is partly fixable by creating less horrible ASCII representation, but this would take a lot of coordination that was hard even back then and is virtually impossible now. If someone told me in 500 years we're still running dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 absolutely unchanged, I'd believe it.

9 comments

api

Reply
zamadatix  4 days ago

Half the reason (literally) the address looks so bad is not because of IPv6 but because everyone keeps choosing to implement randomized in-subnet addresses and cycle through them for privacy reasons.

E.g. 2600:15a3:7020:4c51::52/64 is not too horrible but 2600:15a3:7020:4c51:3268:b4c4:dd7b:789/64 is a monster by unrelated intent of the client.

  • flumpcakes  4 days ago

    This is pretty much on the money. IPv6 addressing can be pretty simple if you design your subnets and use low numbers for hosts. But hosts themselves will forgo that and randomly generate 64 bit random host addresses for themselves - some times for every new connection. Now you have thousands of IPv6 addresses for a single computer speaking out to the Internet.

    "Modern" tooling in the consumer space is pretty dire for IPv6 support too. The best you can reasonably get is an IPv6 on the WAN side and then just IPv4 for everything local. At least from the popular routers I've experienced lately.

    • api  4 days ago

      I’ve been amazed for years at the fact that many of the best routers turn V6 off by default.

      Of course I know why. If you turn it on it slightly increases edge case issues as complexity always does. Most people don’t actively need it so nobody notices.

  • api  4 days ago

    Yes, I forgot about SLAAC and worthless privacy extensions.

    Privacy extensions are worthless because there are just sooooo many ways to fingerprint and track you. If you are not at least using a VPN and a jailed privacy mode browser at a bare minimum, you are toast. If you’re serious about privacy you have to use stuff like Tor.

    V6 privacy extensions are like the GDPR cookie nonsense: ineffective countermeasures with annoying side effects.

    SLAAC sucks too. They should have left assignment up to admins or higher level protocols like with V4. It’s better that way.